Marjorie Taylor Greene suggests Israel pressuring Trump not to release Epstein files
Firebrand MAGA lawmaker with history of antisemitic comments asserts on CNN that ‘the right question to ask is, was Jeffrey Epstein working for Israel?’
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Amid a bitter feud with US President Donald Trump, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested on Sunday that Israel is pressuring the White House not to release the full files on Jeffrey Epstein.
In an interview on CNN, Greene was asked about a post on X a day earlier in which she wrote: “It really makes you wonder what is in those files and who and what country is putting so much pressure on him?” alongside a graphic boasting that she had received zero campaign funds from the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby.
“I think it’s the question that many Americans are asking, especially when we saw information recently come out in these e-mails that the Oversight Committee that I serve on has released,” Greene responded during the interview, about the growing focus on the alleged sex trafficker, who died of suicide in prison in 2019.
“And we saw Jeffrey Epstein with ties to Ehud Barak. We saw him making business deals with them, also business deals that involved the Israeli government, and seems to have led into their intel agencies. And I think the right question to ask is, was Jeffrey Epstein working for Israel?” the congresswoman continued.
There is no substantial evidence of any ties between Epstein and Israeli intelligence. Allegations that Epstein has ties to the Mossad have circulated for years based on an array of disparate connections: The fact that he was Jewish; his visits to Israel, among many other countries; and his friendship with former prime minister Ehud Barak, one of many high-profile figures he associated with, including Trump himself.
Earlier this year, former Fox News host and conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson alleged that Epstein was working for the Mossad and that he has “never met anyone who doesn’t think that.”
This and the Epstein files is why I’m being attacked by President Trump.
It really makes you wonder what is in those files and who and what country is putting so much pressure on him?
I forgive him and I will pray for him to return to his original MAGA promises. https://t.co/YltouujS83 pic.twitter.com/X1zFACSnEo
— Marjorie Taylor Greene ???????? (@mtgreenee) November 15, 2025
Greene, who has also become a harsh critic of Israel during its two years of war against Hamas in Gaza, sparked by the terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack, said on CNN that she was “proud to say I don’t take money from AIPAC. I don’t take money from any special group of people.”
Pressed by the interviewer if she was alleging that Israel was pushing Trump to keep the files under wraps, Greene — who has repeatedly trafficked in antisemitic tropes throughout her career — responded: “No, I simply just asked out loud, is there a foreign government? It could be any foreign government. But is a foreign government pushing to keep this covered up? Because people just don’t understand the big fight against what is in these files?”
The assertion that someone circulating a harmful and baseless theory is “just asking questions” is a commonplace tactic among conspiracy theorists and extremists.
Greene was then questioned during the interview about her relationship with Nick Fuentes, a prominent Holocaust denier and vocal antisemite.
She claimed that while she spoke at a conference that he organized in 2022, “I myself am not antisemitic. I have never criticized the Jewish people or said anything about them in particular. I am critical of their — the government of Israel,” she said, correcting herself after conflating Israel and the Jewish people, a common antisemitic trope.
Greene is perhaps best known in some circles for circulating a conspiracy theory in 2018 that the Rothschild banking family was involved in installing space solar generators that were responsible for sparking wildfires in California, in what became widely mocked as her “Jewish space lasers” theory. She later claimed that she had no idea that the Rothschilds were a Jewish family. Earlier this year, Greene also suggested that former US president John F. Kennedy was assassinated over his opposition to Israel’s nuclear program.
The firebrand Republican lawmaker and once devout Trump backer has become locked in a bitter feud with the US president after joining two other Republicans to cross the aisle and support Democrats’ demand to fully release the so-called “Epstein files,” in which it is widely believed that Trump himself — who had a well-documented relationship with Epstein — appears multiple times.
On Friday, Trump escalated their battle, saying that he was pulling his endorsement for Greene, calling the hard-right representative from Georgia a “ranting lunatic.”
“All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” he wrote on Truth Social.
An early sign of Greene’s rift with Trump came when she said Trump’s intervention on behalf of Israel in its 12-day war with Iran in June, during which the US bombed Iranian nuclear sites, was at odds with the president’s professed “America First” ideology. Greene also broke with other Republicans over the summer by calling the war in Gaza a “genocide,” a charge Israel vehemently denies.
Greene has also been critical on health care and particularly the cost of living crisis, telling Trump to focus on the “home front” instead of foreign policy and peace deals.
Perhaps the most sensitive area of criticism has been Greene’s position on the Epstein scandal, which the White House has sought to cast as a hoax against Trump by Democrats.
The scandal ensnared Trump again in recent days after the US Congress released a trove of the disgraced financier’s emails indicating Trump “knew about the girls” and “spent hours” with one of Epstein’s victims at the home of the late pedophile, who died by suicide in prison during Trump’s first term, in 2019.
The Times of Israel Community.